1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to video teleconferencing and, more specifically, to devices which make video teleconferencing less expensive and more convenient: namely, a specially-devised portable video recorder that can be used as a regular recording video camera and as a teleconferencing terminal and video answering machine.
2. Description of Related Art
The ordinary telephone is now over 100 years old. People have come to take for granted and to depend upon the ability to carry on, with ease, conversations with persons located halfway around the world. With the recent blossoming of cellular telephone service, the parties conversing do not have to be tied to any wire connections. Yet a persistent dream for over 50 years has been the ability to add a moving image to a telephone so that the conversation would include sight as well as sound. The terms "teleconferencing," "video teleconferencing," "video-conferencing," "video telephone", and "video-phone" all refer to a communication system that provides simultaneous sound and visual communication with a simplicity of operation similar to that of current telephones.
Much more business information could be readily transmitted if telephones were video as well as audio. Decisions could be made more rapidly and with more certainty if the parties could see and gauge each other's expressions. In terms of personal conversations, visual contact would allow more rapid and accurate communication of important emotions. Technological limitations of the present telephone and TV cable infrastructures have proven to be the primary stumbling blocks to achieving visual contact during a telephone conversation. That is, the technology to capture video as well as audio is well developed, but video signals have a large bandwidth which readily exceeds the capacity of present cables and other transmission systems. However, the completion of a fiberoptic infrastructure and the recent advances in signal compression should go a long way to overcoming these problems. In just a few years millions of people may be video conferencing.
However, fiberoptic cables and other transmission enhancements will not cause teleconferencing to appear overnight. Consumers will need specially designed teleconferencing hardware to take advantage of the new communication medium. Imagine the millions upon millions of telephones that will have to be replaced by video-telephone systems. This will result in considerable equipment expense for the consumer. The consumer might solve the problem by using video cameras contained in a housing with a speaker and microphone placed on top or near a television or computer monitor. Another, and possibly more costly, alternative is the use of special telephones that include a video display, video camera, microphone, and speaker.
One can expect a well-equipped video-phone user to have all the accoutrements of the present telephone user. Thus, an additional expense will doubtless be the video answering machine. A complete system may be so costly that many consumers may not have the resources to enjoy teleconferencing. Widespread acceptance of new types of consumer electronics is often very cost sensitive. For example, color television, video cassette tape recorders (VCRs), and home computers were on the market for a considerable period of time before the availability of inexpensive hardware made them popular. If economical teleconferencing hardware is available, the acceptance of that technology may be accelerated.
Although commonly-available hardware like the ubiquitous portable video camera/recorder (camcorder) has some of the attributes of a teleconferencing systems, current hardware has many drawbacks. The home camcorder can provide audio and visual pickup, but lacks simultaneous incoming and outgoing signal processing capabilities, phone ringing, dialing, and answering machine capabilities and, in most cases, has an inadequate image display to be useful in teleconferencing. The consumer will need to purchase additional components to even use a camcorder in a teleconferencing system.
Specialized video-phone hardware developed to date also fails to offer an economical solution. U.S. Pat. No. 5,046,079 to Hashimoto provides a special telephone answering device with a TV telephone. This unit can record an incoming picture as well as an incoming message. Like a standard answering machine, it also transmits a prerecorded message. This device can record an incoming video signal, but has no means for producing or transmitting a video signal in turn. U.S. Pat. No. 5,189,691 to Dunlap teaches the use of a dual deck VCR to act as a video telephone answering machine. Essentially, the unit is a dual VCR with telephone answering machine logic so that a video-phone line will be automatically answered, a prerecorded video message will be transmitted to the caller, and a video message from the caller will be recorded. There is no provision for facilities to produce the outgoing message.